The house on Prospect Avenue in Gloversville where Marguerite and her brothers grew up had, according to her mother, only one prospect—to be gotten out of as soon as possible.

Marguerite liked it because it was a two-family house and her Vitale cousins lived upstairs. Nunzio Vitale had married Sam Scalzo’s sister Emma; but Uncle Nunzio was, Carla Scalzo said, right off the boat. He spoke with a thick accent, was a manual laborer at Sam’s place, and a whole generation behind the others in his Americanization. What was worse, he didn’t care; he was cheerful and unambitious, and tended his fruit trees and plants at home without even knowing that beyond his fence there were golf clubs and bowling leagues to join for his exercise if he could only change his name, his looks, his accent.

Marguerite learned that it was not nice to look too Italian and to speak bad English the way Uncle Nunzio did. Italians were not a serious people, her father would say—look at Jimmy Durante and Al Capone; Sacco and Vanzetti. Italians were buffoons, anarchists and gangsters, womanizers. “What are we, Dad, aren’t we Italian?” she would ask. “We’re Americans,” he’d say firmly, making her wonder about all the people in the shadows who came before him. Grandma Umbertina was exempt, even though she didn’t speak English, because she had made good.

Some of Marguerite’s earliest memories were of picnics with Grandma Umbertina at Lake Petulia. She had a photograph of herself when she was a child of three or four—a pretty round-faced girl in a wispy dress, barefoot, sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree that jutted into the lake. She remembered those occasions so well: the big boys among her Longobardi cousins playing touch tackle in the field, the girls wading and squealing foolishly; her mother and aunts busying themselves with hampers of food. The men spread blankets on the ground and played poker. And Grandma Umbertina was a large, motionless, black figure peering through spectacles like a solemn owl. She was always seated in the shade of a giant tree eating and watching.

Marguerite had always felt attracted to that mysterious old woman with whom she couldn’t even speak. There was a picture of her up in the attic in an oval gilt frame; she was a young woman then, standing straight and stiff at the side of nine-month-old Uncle Paul, who was propped up in a wicker high-chair and looking dazedly out from yards of white clothing. It was with that handsome, proud, direct-gazing, unflinching peasant face that Marguerite wanted kinship.